What the trees taught me
When a city girl spends just 20 minutes in the woods
Humans have long employed the technique of wandering aimlessly in nature to clear their heads. For folks like myself who are physically incapable of relaxing, this is a horrifying concept. Thankfully, the Japanese eventually named this concept shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing. Because when you assign a name to something vague, it becomes a planned activity.
Forest bathing was born from the tech boom burnout of 1980s Japan. So it’s fitting that — on a camping retreat with my own tech company in the year 2022 — I, too, found myself partaking in a forest bath. One cool and foggy morning, I ambled away from camp and into a grove of ancient sequoias.
As a city girl, I find something romantic about walking alongside hundreds of people, watching them diverge into groups entering one of many high-rises downtown. That morning, I challenged myself to look at the trees with the same intense admiration I look at skyscrapers. How many generations of birds have these trees seen? How many people have sought refuge in their shade? How many natural disasters have they endured to persist in this spot for over a millennium?
For a moment, I wished I was a redwood tree. Evergreen. Unmovable. And with great posture.
Redwoods and skyscrapers have something in common. When I stand surrounded by magnificently tall feats of human-made engineering filled with collections of humans solving complex problems, I feel simple. My biggest ideas are a mere drop in the ocean. They must flow with other drops that share a common purpose and, if we’re lucky, we can fill a cup.
When I stand surrounded by magnificently tall feats of nature-made engineering that have seen countless creatures live and breathe through drought, fire, and rain, I also feel simple. My life is a mere sliver of time; these trees have been here since long before the Spaniards came for my country, and they’ll be there long after my great-great-granddaughter begins her quest for world domination.
Walking in the woods, I feel the anxiousness that comes with the uncertainty of other animals moving around me: a coyote rustling in the bushes, a bird overhead. But inevitably, nature just happens, and I breathe and let go. There’s no reasoning with falling pine cones or bird feces. Sometimes bears will be reasonable, if you yell loudly and walk away slowly. Sometimes.
In the city, I feel similarly anxious: about the judgments of people walking past, whether people still care that there’s an ongoing global pandemic. But the skyscrapers are our trees and we are ultimately just animals. Let us breathe, let go, and approach life with the clearheadedness that comes after a walk in the woods. Sometimes people are like bears, but why yell?
After all, a city is its own kind of inevitable nature — an ecosystem of people and processes that just happens.
